Employees locked out of computer systems. Managers avoiding written communications. Long-standing councils shut down without notice.
Only three weeks into the second Trump administration, widespread disruption across the federal government has thrown the lives of thousands of workers into disarray. Many of them — career civil servants who serve under any political party — don’t know how long they’ll be able to keep their jobs.
“It’s a total dismantling of our agencies, and to start over again at some point, it’s pretty scary to me,” said Gay Henson, secretary-treasurer of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents NASA, NOAA, the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Government Accountability Office, along with employers that contract with the government, like Boeing.
“It’s shock, fear, chaos, hurt, all rolled into one ball,” Henson said.
As Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency trounce through agencies to look for cuts, the Office of Personnel Management encouraged federal employees to opt into a “voluntary buyout program,” promising pay until September (even though the government is currently only funded through March). An unsigned email telling people to leave their jobs and take the deal was sent across agencies on Jan. 28, causing doubt among federal employees who spoke to NOTUS that its guarantee could be trusted. Further complicating matters, a federal judge paused the buyout offer’s deadline until a court hearing on Monday. Only about 65,000 workers have taken the deal, CNN reported.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
OPM, which is responsible for maintaining the retirement and health care programs of millions of current and former federal workers, has devolved into “chaos” since Donald Trump took office, one staffer said.
OPM employees used to getting clear directives from management now say their work inboxes have been nearly empty in recent weeks, save for emails encouraging them to take the government’s resignation offer.
“My email is dead quiet,” one staffer told NOTUS. “All anyone is doing is figuring out how to fire everyone.”
“We really are just quite in the dark about everything, about how to even move forward with our own regular work,” another source said.
OPM employees are largely being kept in the dark about the work undertaken by Musk and the DOGE team. DOGE staffers gained access to millions of federal employees’ personnel just days into Trump’s second term, The Washington Post reported. OPM employees scrambled to download copies of their personnel records early into the DOGE takeover for fear they would be lost as data vanished from government sites.
Meanwhile, some senior OPM staffers were locked out of computer systems, according to Reuters. Others faced problems in utilizing data and information from other agencies as Musk’s lieutenants have taken the reins of the OPM website, NOTUS has learned.
OPM staffers are bracing for more to come. Last week, administration officials asked OPM offices to submit plans to ultimately reduce the agency’s own workforce by 70%, sources told NOTUS. Federal News Network first reported the requests.
Staffers said they feared that such deep cuts could cripple the agency’s ability to carry out essential services, among them overseeing health care benefits and retirement services for millions of federal workers.
OPM declined to comment for this article.
At least some directors at OPM submitted plans that would gut the teams they oversee and supervisors made appeals for certain employees to be spared and sought to explain the importance of some of OPM’s largest programs, sources said.
Last Thursday, Acting OPM Director Charles Ezell directed the leaders of every agency to turn over information pertaining to every employee whose performance rating was less than “fully successful” at any point in the last three years. Some of Musk’s aides are joking about the firings. Christopher Stanley, a former SpaceX and X engineer who shifted to a role at the White House, compared the team to “The Bobs,” the characters from “Office Space” tasked with identifying employees to be laid off.
At the Department of Transportation, staffers are confused about who is eligible for the buyout offers. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Friday that “air traffic controllers were always exempt” from the buyouts, but air traffic controllers were among those who initially received emails encouraging them to resign from the federal workforce, NOTUS confirmed.
DOT told FAA workers that air traffic controllers and other specialists were disallowed from taking the buyout in an email a day before the deferred resignation offer was set to expire.
“Aircraft controllers, the safety inspectors, they’re trying to do their jobs, and they are hard, highly pressurized situations that they have to work in, and having these ‘fork’ emails come to us telling us that we’re being unproductive, it’s a distraction,” one Federal Aviation Administration employee told NOTUS.
Beyond the OPM’s messaging, the employee said they haven’t heard a word from other managers, at least in writing.
“There’s been a lot of confusion and messaging from one part of the agency that’s different from other parts. None of this is being written down, where everything we’re hearing is just like through our management chain word of mouth,” the FAA employee said.
“This is completely unheard of, that we’re not supposed to be receiving written communications about any of this from our managers or directors or executives,” the employee added.
Henson told NOTUS that the administration does not seem to respect that government workers “want to serve the country and the people of the country.”
“I don’t think there’s a single idea in this administration that anybody in the federal government is serving anybody, and that’s very sad, because it’s not true,” she said.
One U.S. Agency for International Development employee working on their global health team as a nurse expressed a similar sentiment. She could work in a hospital, but she chose to work for USAID out of a belief in its mission, she said.
The nurse, who did not want to use her name for fear of repercussion, attended a protest outside the agency’s headquarters last Monday. At the time, she still had her job and had been told she had a protected status as a foreign service member.
By Thursday, she had been put on administrative leave. The signs on the agency headquarters were removed, and only 294 of USAID’s 14,000 employees were allowed to work, including just 12 overseeing Africa, eight for Latin America and eight for Asia.
“It kind of has just been radio silence, no one knows what’s going on,” the USAID nurse told NOTUS. “So many people around the world are going to die because of this.”
The whiplash continued later in the week, after two unions representing USAID employees filed a lawsuit Thursday to reverse the employees’ leave and the executive order freezing all foreign aid. Finally, by Friday, a Trump-appointed federal judge blocked the employees from being put on leave.
Even if workers return to their jobs, the ramifications of the USAID funding cuts will be hard to reverse. USAID contracts with nongovernmental organizations for much of its work, and these groups have been forced to fire or furlough most staff or shut down entirely.
One manager of a contractor who works with USAID on health issues said that 90% of their 3,000-person staff has been laid off. This organization focuses on preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, and the manager predicted tuberculosis could spread in the U.S. if important health care work stops.
“None of this surprises me because I’ve lived through regimes like this in other parts of the world,” the NGO manager said. “What’s taken me by surprise is that it’s taken the Democrats by surprise.”
Democrats joined protests last week in support of government workers, but some people have urged them to do more. The dozen Democratic members of Congress who spoke at a rally in support of USAID on Wednesday were met with boos from the hundreds of USAID employees and contractors before them.
“Shut down the Senate,” “Hold the nominees,” “Congress, Congress, Congress” were just a few of the chants. Even with a microphone, the lawmakers were drowned out.
One subcontractor, who was furloughed along with 700 of his colleagues, said he wants Democratic senators to hold up all Trump nominees until the cuts stop. Sens. Brian Schatz and Chris Van Hollen have vowed to block State Department nominees.
“They should have learned from the best in terms of obstruction, what would Mitch McConnell do is the question we should be asking,” he said.
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Katherine Swartz and Mark Alfred are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.